The Immigrants’ Journey

Learning to lead others where you have never been before

For the longest time, I wanted to write about leaders and immigrants. Leaders, because we are all leaders now. Immigrants, because in many ways we are all immigrants now. And because immigrants are beautiful, powerful, and worthy of our respect. I hope you enjoy it!

The original of the article below was recently published in the Developing Leaders Quarterly and is behind the journal’s paywall.

---

“He who travels gently, travels safely; and he who travels safely, travels far.”
~ Joseph Thompson, Scots Explorer in 19th Century

In his 1949 tome, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell synthesized his massively influential mythic model of the ‘Hero’s Journey’. Even if you don‘t know it by name, you know it in substance. From the Mesopotamian epic of Gilgamesh written around 2100 BC, through Homer‘s Iliad to Star Wars, Harry Potter, and almost every Hollywood movie, the Hero‘s Journey format endures in how we narrate our lives and decipher our leadership challenges.

The vast majority of stories in the West are one version or another of the Hero‘s Journey. Campbell, somewhat obliviously, labels it and praises it as a monomyth. The Hero’s Journey has incredible explanatory power of our experiences. Yet, human experiences can give rise to different explanations and stories. At the moment, we are in danger of finding ourselves on the depleted soil of a monomyth. (Discover more about the strengths and drawbacks of the Hero’s Journey in this related article This Is Not Your Story).

Over the years, this has led me to imagine what could be another kind of journey and story conflict that we need now - one that is more accurate about our present condition and more generative for our times.

The Hero‘s Journey format endures in how we narrate our lives and decipher our leadership challenges. Yet, human experience can give rise to different stories.

I have been experimenting with the concept of the Immigrants’ Journey in leadership development contexts with delightful results. It goes like this: We are immigrating into the future.

Stuck Heroes

When my daughter, Leta, was on her hero’s journey in the dragon-land of her high school, at the very same time, I was on my hero’s journey of slaying my dragon. I was to become a New York City teenage daughter’s parent. She, trapped in thinking this story was all about her dealing with the challenges of clueless parents and the magical yet treacherous world of her high school, and I, trapped in thinking this story was all about me dealing with the crowning mid-life task of protecting and passing on the wisdom to my posterity. Two stuck heroes.

I thought, “what if I cease seeing this as my journey?” So, I told her, “We have never had this relationship before. I don’t know what I’m doing. You don’t know what you are doing. Let’s help each other immigrate into territory that’s new for both of us.”

I told her, “Look, we are entering this world where I’m learning to be a teenager’s parent, and you’re learning to be an adult. It’s new for you. It’s new for me. I feel lost. You feel lost. What if there’s no need for this push and pull to see whether you can deal with me or I can deal with you? Let’s invite ourselves to immigrate to a new place where we both dare to experience being different. It would be a step into a new land where you and I would be displaced. Do you want to do this?”

Every story needs a conflict, and we had a better conflict. Instead of heroes needing villains and victims, the challenge was in us discovering and entering a new way of seeing, doing, and relating.

We crossed the threshold into the unknown. The heaviness lifted, and fresh air enveloped us. This was quite a different story. Mobilizing, sturdy, dangerous, and joyful. It was exciting! The new perspective affected my parenting from then on and fundamentally changed us. Today, we are still leading and following each other.

We took the Immigrants’ Journey. Notice the plural pronoun.

I now approach my life, love, and leadership differently. I adjust how I see who we are and who we are becoming. With heroes, villains, and victims in cameo roles, I found myself in a place of far more possibilities. I started using this concept in my executive coaching, consulting, and speaking. There were stuck heroes everywhere I turned.

Another Kind of Journey

In contrast to the Hero’s Journey, the Immigrants’ Journey is not sequential or neat. It resembles life more closely. We are all invited to live lives greater than we can control and lead others to learn to do the same. So, Campbell’s 17 steps have not fallen into place. There are no stages. Anything can happen at any time, anywhere and we find stability in our common human capacity to respond to life in real-time, re-interpret our past, and have grounded faith in the future. We do not roadmap. We wayfind.

Wayfinding is an irreducibly human capacity to live, love, or lead through uncertainty. It confronts us with the astonishing fact of being here now, insists on giving meaning to our experience, and meets our needs for belonging and becoming. In contrast to road-mapping or GPSing, which detach us from the landscape, wayfinding is a skill of leading as we go. There is always a new way.

An immigrant is a contemporary and more recognizable word for wayfinder. We continuously find a new home, take on new responsibilities, and become someone new.

Wayfinding, the earliest human capacity to move from known to unknown, has been well-researched by anthropology and neuroscience. Every species has its umwelt (one of those nifty German words) directly translated as “world-around.” It conveys the uniqueness of the species’ genius. We, humans, have this one thing that separates us from every other species: Left to ourselves, we walk into the unknown, befriend it, and learn to delight in it. We can’t help it. It took us a mere 20,000 years from grunting about our plan to catch dinner together to developing the theories about the universe’s consciousness. We are wayfinders.

Immigrant is a contemporary and more recognizable word for wayfinder. We continuously find a new home, take on new responsibilities, and become someone new.

Wayfinding has been our way since time immemorial. The very first human power was to find ourselves curious or frightened enough to get out of the confines of our shelters. Then we walked to the end of the familiar territory, then forward and forward again, learning to survive and thrive by finding a way we have never been on before. Walking, talking, inventing fire, the wheel, mirrors, juicing, soccer, computing all came as we went about our real business of befriending the unknown.

The true gift of wayfinding is not the arrival at the destination. It is who we become along the way. It is not that we have been finding a way out there; it is that we have changed as we did. Our wayfinding is as inner as it is outer. Yes, our world’s problems seem insurmountable. We know we cannot simply do what we have done in the past. But we are not doomed. Here is the good news: we are not the same humans we were back then and can do something we have never done before.

One more thing. In more personal terms, wayfinding is also about learning your particular way of traveling toward your horizon. Whenever we cross a critical threshold, we enter the unknown realm and temporarily disorientate. We become inner-life wayfinders as we discover the creativity that can only come with the experience of being a bit lost.

Immigrating is about knowing how to take your next very ordinary step, and then next, and then next, alone and in the company, always learning, always looking back to the pliable past and forward with our hearts tethered to the horizon that is calling. Knowing how to travel well may be the best definition of happiness. And to help others learn to do the same, the most rewarding view of leadership.

There is one non-negotiable quality of a leader. Having faith in the future. You have to believe that the unknown will not only serve new dangers and challenges but also supply you with new energy, truth, and joy. None of us have any business leading without this sort of faith in ourselves, others, and the world. As Michael Margolis, the leading authority on narratives for disruption, puts it, “Disruption sucks. So, give people faith in the future.”

You, an Immigrant

Before we go on, a clarification.

We think of immigrants as other people. Those of us who have been in a stable geographical configuration are not used to thinking of ourselves as immigrants. But we are. We all are.

We are all displaced. Whether or not someone is from this company, community, or country does not matter. Everything around us is shifting. It is not that we have moved into a different place; it is that a different place has surrounded us. Look back. We are not where we were a year ago or even a month ago. Transition upon transition upon transition. It is bewildering. In the new world of informational, political, and scientific “overwhelm” and escalating complexity, none of us feel at home as we used to.

We are all on the move from the known into the unknown - everybody. There is no home for the hero to return to. We are creating new homes as we go, and it is as scary as it is exhilarating. And we do it together. It is not that we are vulnerable. It is that we are vulnerable together. “It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is a part of our common humanity,” says Salman Rushdie.

Leaders with whom I have shared this invitation to see themselves as immigrants felt empowered, particularly if they were not geographical immigrants. “Now I know why I feel the way I feel. I am an immigrant too,” they would say. “This helps me lead others with more empathy and imagination.”

Three Skills That Matter

Let’s select and review three immigrant skills that can make our leadership more robust.

1. Perspective

It is entirely possible to change one‘s perspective.

Nobody knows this better than immigrants. Almost by definition, only immigrants know the meaning of having a new perspective.

As we immigrate, we change not only the answers to our questions but also the questions themselves. With the new questions, we change where our attention goes. And where our attention goes, our mind and heart follow.

If our perspective can change, everything can change.

Without embracing our status as immigrants, we fully invest ourselves in defending and perfecting our established views, which is another way of safeguarding the biases that have been running our lives in the known that is no more.

Immigrants, on the other hand, are willing to drop their old maps for a moment. They have to. As mathematician Ludwig Wittgenstein put it, “The limits of language are the limits of my world.” Instead of looking for a villain, immigrants focus on learning a new language. Made of new words, concepts, or experiences, this language can be literal, nonverbal, emotional, cultural, business, or a new kind we don‘t even know yet.

Immigration can occur from country to country, from system to system, from this to the next epoch of our lives. In each case, it is a journey from one way of seeing to an additional way of seeing everything. Two ways of seeing are far more than double. It is experiential proof, a bodily experience and the memory of that experience, that there is truth, kindness, and beauty outside of the way we are used to being in the world. That is a mystical moment.

Perspective is today’s leader’s defining asset not more information, not more time, and not more power. When the tsunami of information, knowledge, and wisdom is drowning us, people follow the leaders who will help them get on a hill.

How do you see?

That is what matters. Your perspective determines how you show up in every moment and what stories you tell.

2. Practice

It is entirely possible to change one‘s practice.

Immigrants embrace the role of apprentice again.

Instead of observing change and talking about it, chasing an illusion of managing change, or indulging in calling themselves change agents, they learn to inhabit change.

This is humbling. Rainer Maria Rilke writes in a poem, “The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.” Immigrants acknowledge the forces larger than their own lives and are finding their way to survive and thrive in a story larger than their own.

We live and lead in a reality far larger than what we can control. Yet, there is one thing we can control: our practice. While navigating the new landscape, our previous views become difficult to maintain. Our new experiences no longer fit our old explanations. New experiences and new experiences make new and more useful explanations possible.

We are entering a new landscape with old maps, gravitating to answers based on the intuition that has sustained us in the past. Our intuition is our capacity to have a lucid moment that helps us deal with complexity.

However, it is based on our experiences up to the present moment. That is why we have to recalibrate our intuitions with new experiences. Without updating them as we go, our intuitions deteriorate into biases.

On a more personal level, we can never control the outcomes the way we can control what we do day-to-day, the rituals, the habits, and others routines.

The artists stand with one foot in the known and one in the unknown, communicating from that place to us. They do not have control of their communication‘s impact, but they do have control of their process and practice. A painter cannot paint six masterpieces at will, but she can create her masterful practice of showing up in the shop and doing her thing her way six hours a day.

The results are not up to her, but the process is.

This is the case with the change artists, too, which is another name for leaders.

Controlling results is daunting personally, professionally, and spiritually because it is impossible. Even if it were possible, control would render our lives deathly dull. We live in a complex system made of complex systems. But complexity does not have to be complicated. It is possible and critical to respond to complexity overload with some form of radical simplicity. More likely than not, such radical simplicity will be in the form of practice.

A thought leader on how to live in complex times, Jennifer Garvey Berger asks a helpful question we can use: “Who have I been, and who am I becoming?” I think this is less of a question of pondering and more of a question of observing. You will not become who you wish or strain to be. You will become who you practice becoming.

What is your practice of becoming?

We want our life and leadership to produce something of great value, and here is the kicker: The practice is that something. In economics-speak, the practice is the product.

3. Participation

It is entirely possible to change how we relate to the world.

We begin our adult journey when we finally cross the threshold called ‚’ I’m enough’. Once we utter this with conviction, it is a joyful new beginning with a wide-open floodgate of confidence and accomplishments. That is what lots of leadership coaching for people in their 20s, 30s, and even 40s is about. Later in a leadership career, the path of growth leads through realizing something quite startling: Actually, I am not enough.

Everything that matters to us, lasting and meaningful, cannot be done alone. In some ways, our early career resistance to saying ‚ “I am enough” is a premonition of the future discovery that, in some fundamental way, ‘I am, in fact, not enough’. ‘As Carl Jung puts it, ‘The first half of life is devoted to forming a healthy ego’, the second half is going inward and letting go of it. ‘

Hero‘s epiphany: I am enough.

Immigrant‘s epiphany: I am not enough.

Both are necessary. This is one of the reasons we cannot afford to live with a monomyth.

What is it that you want but can never accomplish alone? Go and give your best to that, and you will soon realize that your best is not enough. You merely (and gloriously!) participate.

When the time is right, cross the threshold called ‘I‘m not enough.‘ Then, ask for help and offer help. This is one of the most crucial thresholds one has to cross on the way to executive-level leadership. Your participation is not what you do when you cannot do leaderly things. Your participation is the highest calling and experience of leadership.

Being an immigrant never resolves. You continually take the risk of trusting the unsafe world. Which is the only way we can walk into the future.

I play the role of leader as needed. Others play the role of leader as needed. We all participate. The story is largely not about me. It is like the meaning of Ubuntu: ‘I am what I am because of who we all are.‘

The Invitation

Leadership at its best is modelling followership. A leader is a lover. We love and care for something deeply, so much so that we are willing to get lost in order to find it.

We are willing to enter the borderland where we continually leave and arrive. It is not a phase. It is a place where we are learning to make our home now.

We live more than our own heroic story. We discover other stories, participate, and sing our songs, old and new, perhaps all night long, as immigrants do.

The unknown is dangerous. It is also a place where our not-yet-known collaborators, questions, and answers await to be found. It is all so exciting!

Unlike the Hero‘s Journey, the Immigrants’ is not a story of defending our perceptions until the strife teaches us otherwise. We are not blinded to the ordinary mysticism of being where we already are. Instead of bending others to fit our story, we invite them to our story and let them invite us to theirs.

Often, we don‘t need or even want to be heroes. With all its dangers, the unknown is also waiting for us in friendship. We don‘t know who we will become but are not frightened because whoever we become will catch us.

Leaders who learn to articulate a new way of journeying to their people in a plausible, felt, and pragmatic way will touch them the way the Hero‘s Journey used to touch people, eliciting a nod of recognition and giving expression to a new and newly alive language that can meet the challenges we face.

Let‘s summarize our three leadership tips:

1. Perspective: Watch over the way you see.

2. Practice: Do what is yours to do.

3. Participation: Enjoy leading and being led.

Leadership is an invitation. Whether to our daughters, organizations, teams, board members, friends, or enemies, we say, “Let‘s not go where I am, as beautiful as that place seems to me. Let‘s not go where you are, as wonderful as that place seems to you. Let‘s go together to a place that neither you nor I have been before.”

👇🏾 I would love to hear from you about anything in the article that has resonated with you. Please leave a comment below. Thank you!